1. San Diego, 2-0The funny thing about the Chargers: Every team has at least one serious flaw, but everyone wrote off the Bolts because of the “downgrade” at QB to Philip Rivers. You would have thought they were replacing Brees with Bruce Gradkowski’s illegitimate brother, Cliff. Rivers was the No. 4 pick in the 2004 draft, remember? The next seven picks were Sean Taylor, Kellen Winslow Jr., Roy Williams, D’Angelo Hall, Reggie Williams, Dunta Robinson, Ben Roethlisberger and Jonathan Vilma. He’s no stiff. I’d say it’s more probable that Rivers becomes a good QB right away over Indy suddenly figuring out how to stop the run, or the Bengals not getting killed by off-the-field stuff, or the Eagles making it to Miami without anyone who can run for a first down when they need one.

Of course, all of this is mitigated by two words: “Marty” and “Schottenheimer.” But you know what? We don’t have to worry about that for another four months. I think they’re the best team right now, and I think they throttle the Ravens in Baltimore on Sunday. And that’s why you rank the teams.

I found some bugs in the web interface for a Linksys WRT54G router I bought to fix some 2Wire “issues”. One of the bugs just would give me a false error when trying to do something and keep the form from being submitted.

Anyway, the short version of this entry is that I found out that you can flash your Linksys with an entirely new firmware. Ultimately, I just wanted to fix the bug so I could do what the Linksys is supposed to do to begin with. But after installing it, it looks like you can do all sorts of other interesting things… like run crontab processes (since it’s Linux).

Anyway, if you have a Linksys WRT54G (they are pretty popular), and you are a dork, you may want to give it a go… but don’t blame me if you screw yours up (mine was fine).

If you are a programmer, have you ever had one of those bizarre situations where you know something is not working, but you aren’t getting an error or anything else that would make debugging easy?

A couple days ago I migrated a cluster of web servers to PHP 5.1.x (they were running PHP 4.4.x before). One of the things I run on them is a geo targeting mechanism, and in the case where my screw-up was, a function to block a subnet of IP addresses.

[code=php]echo sprintf(“%u”, ip2long(‘ 80.1.2.3′));[/code]

That little bit of code was my fuck up… PHP 4.4.x returns “1342243331” (as expected), but PHP 5.1.x would return “0“. PHP4 was more forgiving of the stray leading space before the IP address, while PHP5 was not. The end result was that every IP address before 81.1.2.3 was blocked, instead of blocking FROM that IP address to an end IP address (that was not very many IPs away).

Awesome… so what happened here? I ended up blocking about 40% of the potential traffic for awhile, which equated out to probably about $10,000 in lost revenue.

The lesson learned? Don’t fuck around with spaces, because they will cost you many hours of debugging/tracing as well as ~$10,000.

The San Diego Chargers didn’t play this week (they had a bye), yet they went from #7 to #5 in the NFL power rankings. Oddly enough, the team they play this weekend (the Ravens) did play this last weekend (and won), yet they went from a #6 to a #8 ranking. {shrug}

So back in June, I made a post that helps people understand the MPAA’s “Pyramid of Piracy”. As I pointed out last month, BitTorrent.com (the company, not the software), which is one of the MPAA’s partners is actually one of the biggest “facilitators” by their own definition.

Well now the MPAA has at least one other partner that is also on the Pyramid of Piracy… and this one is higher up in the pyramid. Guba.com is a Top Site on the pyramid.

It will be interesting to see how long before an MPAA partner is at the top of their pyramid as a “Supplier”. Oh wait, maybe the MPAA is saving that slot for itself. 😉

Update

Speaking of movies, I went to the movies last night for the first time in a long, long time and I saw Black Dahlia. A pretty crappy movie… up there on the “crap scale” with A Thin Red Line. Not only was it not worth the $10 movie ticket, it wouldn’t be worth the bandwidth to download it (legally or illegally).

Now I remember why I don’t go to the movies… Because they are are boring compared to real life and an utter waste of time. Maybe if someone would make a good movie, the MPAA wouldn’t be pissing and moaning about declining ticket sales.

24 hours before your special day, the Hot Spotâ„¢ on the interior surface of your Remember Ringâ„¢ will warm to 120Âº F for approximately 10 seconds, and continue to warm up every hour, on the hour, all day long!

I threw together a time lapse of the basement being built. The end of it is today, when they took all the forms off the basement walls and we actually have freestanding concrete walls. Now for the waterproofing of the walls…

The movie runs through 4 hours per second. The resolution is a bit lame, but hey… can’t keep YouTube from down sampling it.

OAKLAND, (CA)–Oakland Raiders football practice was delayed nearly two hours today after a player reported finding an unknown white powdery substance on the practice field. Head coach Art Shell immediately suspended practice and called the police and federal investigators. After a complete analysis, FBI forensic experts determined that the white substance unknown to players was the GOAL LINE. Practice resumed after special agents decided the team was unlikely to encounter the substance again.

This really is stupid IMO… if you are worried about your weight so much that you need to go out of your way to buy a camera that actually makes you look slimmer than you really are, maybe you should just go to the gym or something. Unless you are a model and that’s your livelihood, I don’t see the point of this…

I was just thinking… Google needs to build an API for Gmail. Then we could do things like POP our email into an email client, and then run a script from within the email client that is able to go back to Gmail and tag stuff as spam, apply a label, etc.

That would be handy… can someone please make it so?

Update

Oh, speaking of Gmail, it’s been awhile since I poked around in it’s settings, and I noticed you can now send email from within Gmail as a different address (before it would only let you set the “Reply To” address). Nice… this was a suggestion I sent to them (probably along with a lot of other people) a long time ago. Now I’ll actually use their web interface for sending mail sometimes.

The other thing I noticed if you can use their SSL SMTP servers for sending email as your non-Gmail address. Double nice!

I can’t wait until you can just cut off your own arms and legs and get some of these things by choice.

Mitchell, who lives in Ellicott City, is the fourth person — and first woman — to receive a “bionic” arm, which allows her to control parts of the device by her thoughts alone. The device, designed by physicians and engineers at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, works by detecting the movements of a chest muscle that has been rewired to the stumps of nerves that once went to her now-missing limb.

Today we are getting concrete poured in the basement walls as well as concrete sprayed into the pool. I’m guessing it’s pretty much just going to be a zillion concrete trucks coming and going all day (it looks like they do 4 trucks at a time… 2 for basement and 2 for pool).

Not a bad way to give your new quarterback some confidence. In fact, Philip Rivers didn’t have to do much, but he ended up 8-11 with a touchdown and that gives him a 133.9 quarterback passing rating, which leads the NFL. Of course, it’s only 1 week, but the Chargers have the #1 defense in the NFL as of right now.

Update

I just noticed that every other team in the Charger’s division (Oakland, Denver and Kansas City) lost their opening games this season. That can only be good for the Chargers…

Did I tell you how much I hate the 2Wire router/gateway you have to use for fiber Internet connections? You can’t get into the admin (which is web based) remotely, you can’t use DDNS so when your IP address changes weekly, you have no idea what it changed to, the firewall assumes you are an idiot and can’t do basic stuff with it, etc…

So the IP address changed over the weekend, and the only way to get the new IP is to drive out there and look to see what it is. On the way out there, I had an idea… why not buy a Linksys WRT54G broadband router and just route all in-bound traffic to it. Then you can use it’s firewall and DDNS functions. So that’s what I did… and it works *so* much better… remote admin access and everything else. I even tried to get tricky and route traffic to the Linksys and then right back to the 2Wire to see if I could get to it’s web admin remotely, but no such luck… It ends up redirecting it to a different URL (I’m assuming based on the client not being on the local network)… whatever that part isn’t that important anyway now.

I guess I missed it, but Motorola released a new phone (MOTOKRZR) a few months ago that looks pretty tight. Like a new and improved RAZR. The one thing it has that I’d love to have in my RAZR is support for the high-speed EDGE stuff for fast Internet. But it does seem to have some other handy stuff like a GPS, memory slot, etc.

Now if they could somehow fit a QWERTY keyboard on it, we would be all set…

Did anyone besides me know that it doesn’t get light outside until about 7:15 am?

We went on a half day fishing boat today, and I had to get up at 5:00 am (yuck!!). Our boat went down to Mexican waters almost to Rosarito. Because of that, we had some Mexican beer at 8:30 am (Corona). We almost convinced Shoemoney to hug/spoon a sea lion for $200. haha That would have been a great picture, unfortunately it would also mean that we would be making the arrangements for his funeral… and that’s no fun.

I’ve been practicing checkers for a world event coming soon, and I pretty much dominated this guy I just played. I’m white, I’m going from bottom to top and it’s my move. As you can see, he only got a single one of my pieces.

I might actually be the most glorious checkers player to ever walk on the moon!

I just got a call from the San Diego Police Department letting me know that some Federal investigators recovered my stolen car somewhere in Sonora, Mexico and that they are going to mail me something and that I can come pick it up.

Well first of all, I don’t have the keys for it anymore because my insurance company technically owns it now. Secondly, how does a US Federal something-rather have jurisdiction to recover my stolen car in another country (not that I’m complaining)?

Would be funny (and nice) if my personal stuff happened to still be in the car. hah